T.X. Watson's Pre-EVENT blog

I don't have a huge amount of time to write a post tonight, so I thought I'd share a cool video I saw earlier today. Apparently, Google, NASA, et.al., have teamed up to sponsor the creation of electric planes. Right now, an incredibly energy-efficient plane has been created as a sort of proof-of-concept, which is awesome.

I'm a big fan of high speed electric rail, which I think might have come up here before. The reason is that I don't think we're likely to cut down on the degree to which humans want to travel long distances, but jet planes are not really energy viable in the long term. I figure if we want to avoid environmental and economic collapse, we need to start replacing our long-distance travel technology with substitutes that use less fuel.

My thought was trains, but as this video demonstrates, we might actually be able to get planes off fossil fuels.

That would be awesome, because it strongly suggests the hope for the future that we might be able to safely transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources without massively dropping our luxuries available.